The 90s were a different time. It was a time when Paul Beatty could write an irreverent unfocused lyrical onslaught about what since has become known as racialization. At the time, it was called race, and the categories Beatty most talks about are Black and white (White?). The title refers to a certain walking style used by the group called Caucausians, a walking style that the protagonist identifies and employs to his advantage.
The book is structured as a bildungsroman, starting with young Gunnar Kaufman (which doesn’t really read as a Black name) going to kindergarten and later successive stages of schooling. He goes on to become a basketball player, winning a scholarship for college. He also writes poetry, and in the end he publishes his debut collection entitled Watermelanin. Somewhere in the middle is also a portrayal of the lootings and unheavals surrounding the Rodney King scandal in 1992 (also known as the LA Riots).
I recently chanced upon the Swedish edition of this book, where the title was Svart harakiri, which means Black Harakiri. The subject matter is pretty much untranslatable to Swedish, so I understand the perspicacious title change. Beatty includes some material about Japanese identity, but mostly it is about the travails of being Black and questioning what that is, and even the validity of the concept. It is very sarcastic in tone, even annoyingly so. Setup, punchline, setup, punchline. Beatty seems to have been a precocious kid. Maybe having a feeling of not fitting in, which led to thinking about racial negotiations. Code switching. Rap music. The notion of “acting white”. And that very 90s of words: authenticity.
I guess there are lots of other carnivalesque books with a satirical approach to questions of race and ethnicity, but I don’t know. This one is mostly about ideas of black and white and some about Japanese (the protagonist marries a Japanese woman, and his basketball coach is Japanese – another in-joke, I guess). Some stuff about Jews, Latinos and Germans. The name of the main character is possibly a double reference to Swedish demographer Gunnar Myrdal and anti-comedian Andy Kaufman.
The slogging style gets pretty boring after a while, as it’s just set piece after set piece. There is no real narrative, just outrageous situations and lines. They guy started as a poet and it shows. I guess this style is what made it so popular, but it doesn’t really do much for me. Beatty got a lot of attention 20 years later with the Sellout. I wonder how it differs from this one? There are also other purportedly outrageous writers on race like Ishmael Reed or Percival Everett, but I’ve not read either of them.
Kinship of all Species 